Pacers End Knicks Season With 106-99 Win

INDIANAPOLIS—All series, the Knicks had been waiting for a game like the one they got here Saturday night.

ENLARGE

Pacers center Roy Hibbert is embraced by his parents, Roy, Sr. and Patty Hibbert after the game.
European Pressphoto Agency

Having been locked in four gaunlet-style contests with the rough-and-tumble Indiana Pacers—who are fantastic defensively, but struggle to score—the Knicks figured they'd be in great shape to force a Game 7 if they could only have a breakout game on offense.

The Knicks had plenty of offense on Saturday, but couldn't get stops or rebounds when it mattered most, and the Game 6 semifinal loss—106-99 at Bankers Life Fieldhouse—cost them their season.

"We found offense," guard
Raymond Felton
said, citing a furious third-quarter run in which the Knicks battled their way back into the game. "But it seemed like every time we'd hit a shot or take the lead, [the Pacers would] come back and get a three-point play, or get an offensive rebound or draw a foul. They countered every single run that we made."

Indiana punched back hardest in the fourth, after the Knicks had taken a 92-90 advantage with just under six minutes left in the game.
Carmelo Anthony,
who had been on fire through three quarters in which he'd logged 35 points, went up for a huge dunk attempt, but was denied at the rim by Indiana's 7-foot-2 center
Roy Hibbert.

The play, which on some level served as a microcosm of the entire series, injected life back into the Pacer crowd, and sparked a 9-0 run over the next four minutes of action.

"It was a big play," said Anthony (39 points on 15-for-29 shooting), who struggled for a third-consecutive fourth quarter in which he scored two baskets or less. "A hell of a block. That spearheaded the [end-of-game] run they went on."

Indiana now advances to the Eastern Conference Finals, where they'll be underdogs against the defending champion Miami Heat.

Losing the series shouldn't have been completely surprising for the Knicks, who'd fallen in a 3-1 hole in the best-of-seven series and had battled to simply force a Game 6. Nonetheless, many of the players wore dejected faces in the immediate aftermath of the loss.

Anthony, who made it out of the second round for only the second time in his 10-year career this season, sat at his locker for minutes on end with a blank stare in his eyes. It was the sign of a player who fully expected to go further in the playoffs after the franchise experienced its best season in 13 years and won a division title for the first time since 1994.

Despite the Knicks having entered as the Eastern Conference playoffs as the No. 2 seed, center Tyson Chandler was blunt in calling the third-seeded Pacers "the better team." He pointed to the balanced scoring contributions of Indiana's starting five compared with that of the Knicks, who finished the year 0-5 at Bankers Life Fieldhouse.

On some level, Chandler's veiled criticism was true. The Knicks relied too heavily at times on Anthony, particularly in the first half, when he shot 8-for-16, while the rest of the team went 9-for-32 in that span. They were fortunate to even be within eight, 55-47, at the break despite the game having had the sort of up-tempo pace in which they were accustomed to thriving. The Pacers, who had no trouble at all finding easy shots off offensive rebounds, hit 50% of their first-half attempts, and were relatively balanced offensively.

New York fell into danger during the third, when it fell behind 65-53, but got an enormous boost from second-year swingman
Iman Shumpert,
who logged 16 in the quarter alone, including three triples in a 65-second span. One possession after the third of Shumpert's threes, sixth man
J.R. Smith
knocked down one of his own, tying the score at 72 with 3:10 left. The teams would head into the fourth with an 81-81 tie.

The team—which ranked third in the NBA in offense during the regular season—again couldn't find enough production against the league's top defense in the fourth. The wind all but came out of the Knicks' sails after Hibbert's block, as both Chandler and backup big man
Kenyon Martin
fouled out in the waning minutes.

Smith, the team's second-leading scorer who had been terrible all series, continued his struggles and finished just 4-of-15 from the floor with 15 points and 10 rebounds.

In the end, the Knicks—an offensive juggernaut that relied more on the three-point shot than any other club in NBA history—were undone by a lack of scoring consistency.
Paul George
(23 points, five rebounds), the league's Most Improved Player, applied suffocating one-on-one defense on Anthony, which allowed other defenders to latch onto the Knicks' perimeter players who'd grown accustomed to seeing open looks from outside.

As such, the Knicks' role players struggled mightily against the Pacers and, before that, the Boston Celtics, a pair of teams that pride themselves on making opponents shoot from midrange, by far the most inefficient area of the court. On Saturday in particular, the Knicks hurt themselves by not getting into the paint enough.

They were perfect from the free-throw line, hitting all 18 of their attempts. But the Pacers, who were far more aggressive and effective at getting close looks, had an eye-popping 46 shots from the charity stripe, and converted on 34 of them.

Above all, though, Indiana's brawn—which helped them outrebound the Knicks by an average of almost nine boards per game during the series—effectively spun the Knicks into tailspin after Game 3, when New York coach
Mike Woodson
decided to temporarily discard his small-ball lineup.

He trotted out a more traditional starting lineup grouping, with a true power forward in Martin and Chandler at center, that hadn't even logged a single second of playing time together this season.

The gamble, designed to help the Knicks compensate for their lack of size, backfired and played right into the Pacers' preferred style of play.

But on Saturday, even when the Knicks played their style—at their preferred tempo, with their best player scoring efficiently—they were outdone. And perhaps that shows they were in fact the lesser team in this particular case.

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